Author: Tony Yip

The SITCON x HK 2016 has come to an end on 22 / 10 / 2016. It had a bad weather on Friday, so we failed to prepare for the printed agenda. It was quite inconvenient for the attenders.

Preparing

Holding an event is always not an easy job, it involve lots of works to do.

Call for Venue

First, we need a venue for holding the event. Thanks to the hard work of Clara and Maria from Techie Brain, CSS, CityU, we could hold the event in LT 16 and 17 in the City University of Hong Kong.

Call for sponsorship

Second, an event requires to finance to pay for expenditure of the event. We faced the problem of no company is interested in sponsoring an event which will have unknown participant and don’t much history succeed result. Thanks for the generous of Ben Cheung of Oursky Limited. And with the help of Tsundere Chen, we got the gift and material sponsor from Github Education.

Call for Paper

Next, to provide a good quality talk to the students, we have to spend time to invite speakers and assign for the agenda. I am here to thanks all the speakers of giving great speech and teaching the students so much new and useful knowledge.

Call for helpers

Moreover, helpers is also a key element of holding an event. Thanks to the join of City U, HKBU and HKU, getting us enough helpers to operate the whole event.

Preparing Material

Hence, before the conference, many material had to be prepared. Thanks for Nicholas Yau and Wing Ng to prepare the awesome poster, roll-up stand, banner and other marketing and display material. Also, Clara and Maria helped lots in preparing those material.

Marketing Promotion

In addition, to invite more people to join, marketing promotion is required to boost the event. Thanks for Denny Huang, MouseMs and Philip Chou giving so much useful advice in marketing. Actually, I was studying in Marketing at that moment.

Planning for the whole day

Furthermore, we had to plan for the whole run down for the event, from setting up to cleaning up. Every single detail we miss, the event would be less awesome. As a result, we had to think through the whole event rundown not only once, but for at least three times. We carefully assigned everyone to a right place and ready for any accident. We hoped to give the attendees the best event we can offer.

Review

The attendees is not as much as predict and make me a bit heart broken. The whole event ran smoothly and I am happy about this. The speakers were giving speech to the students which can help much in their career path in the IT industry, even I learnt so much from their talks. I knew there were much things to be improved and I hope you can tell me your opinion by leaving a comment below.

Thanks for those in SITCON x HK 2016

After that, to successfully held this event, we need different helpers to help in the preparation and on-day operations.

Co-Organizers

First, I have to thanks for the three other Co-Organizers apart from SITCON x HK Community:

Sponsorship

Personal Special Thanks

First, I am here to special thank you for the hard work of Clara and Maria, without these two pretty girls, there would not be SITCON x HK 2016. Next, thank you for the great helping hand of Koala Yeung, he helped so much in the whole organizing process. Last but not least, greatly thank you for Wing Hui keeping me alive till the end of SITCON x HK 2016 even she was in a great busy.

Conclusion

Finally, I have to say thank you to many who I did not mentioned in above. Thanks again for those who support SITCON x HK 2016. I hope to you may invite friends to join, help or even sponsor in SITCON x HK 2017 with you. I hope you can tell me your opinion by leaving a comment below.If you want to see more photos of SITCON x HK 2016, you can go to the Flickr Album to see more photos took on the event.

On 7 June, the libSSE-php released version 2.1.0 and providing well interface available to integrate with popular framework. And I release the laravel-sse for the Laravel. The libSSE-php has changed so much comparing from version 1. In this post, I hope to share about the libSSE-php version 2.

Change in libSSE-php

Namespace and packagist

First, the most important change is adding namespaces and available on packagist. To make it simple and easy to remember, I picked the prefix SSE and the packagist package name as tonyhhyip/sse. Most of the classes had the prefix SSE and not being autoload. Therefore, the prefix was changed into namespace SSE. Also, the method name is using the snake case which is not the common practice in PSR-2, as a result, all of them is then changed into lower camelcase.

Data Mechanism and Core Heart

Moreover, In the most common issue of the libSSE-php is people complain about was they are not able to change session data. To solve this issue, Data Mechanism is added for people, which is using apc, mysql and file in version 1. In version 2.0, memcache, redis and PDO mechanism is added to provide more choice for users. Furthermore, in version 2.1, I added a Session Mechanism by making use of Symfony session interface. I make a change on the core heart – class SSE in the version 2.1, it makes use of the Symfony StreamedResponse. As a result, it is more easy to integrate the libSSE-php into the popular PHP framework like Symfony 2 and Laravel.

Release of laravel-sse

Last but not least, I release the laravel-sse, so that the library can be easily used in the most popular PHP framework nowadays.

Recently, some of my friends including those in Taiwan asking me about when will be the next SITCON x HK. I am here to thanks all of your support. And I am here to talk some more about SITCON x HK.

Hardness

However, I need to take the Hong Kong DSE in this year. The Hong Kong DSE would finish on the late April. In May, I am going to have my speech day and ready for the coming up Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2016 in June. And then in July, I have to face the hardness of the release of result of HKDSE and JUPAS. Also, I am going to join the COSCUP in August. It is a hard job for me to organize the SITCON x HK before the Autumn. If you are hoping to go to SITCON x HK, you may expect it in Autumn or Winter.

Organizing a conference is not a simple task like a school project study. It involves call for proposals, promotion, budget planning, ticket selling (even in free), looking for venue and sponsorship, technical (thanks @licson) and many more basic decision.

SITCON x HK 2015

In the last year, SITCON x HK held in the HKOSCon because of luck of time, so most of the problem is solved by the other committees of the HKOSCon. However, SITCON x HK have to become a standalone conference. I have to face these problem by myself which bring me, a F6 student, so much pressure.

It is a very sad news for me every time when I look at the posts on SITCON x HK Facebook Page. The number of people reached is also in a low level. I did ask myself whether I am not doing in the right way or anything I have missed ?

The last SITCON x HK also make me very upset. The number of participant is in a low rate, specially the main target audience, students . I am not meaning there is any problem on the speaker. The main reason of this I think is because of my promotion is not enough and success. After the conference, I am a bit losing the way on SITCON x HK. Specially after the University IT Exploration Conference 2015 (UnitExCon 2015) , I saw much more students joining the conference comparing to the SITCON x HK. I started to ask myself whether I should stop SITCON x HK and let the organizer of UnitExCon, Joint Universities Computer Association (JUCA) to held the conference instead.

I remember the hope of friends of SITCON in Taiwan. I hope they would not be disappointed on this. Therefore, I have decided to let the Hong Kong students to make this decision. I am going to organize SITCON x HK in October or November 2016 and open for the call for staff, proposal and sponsorship since this artical has published until August. I will decide whether I should continue organizing SITCON x HK or not depending on the response from the public in SITCON x HK.

As the task of Google Code-In required and the needs of improvement of control users, I installed GNOME Ubuntu in the school library computer as the OPAC. The original version is Ubuntu Desktop 14.04.3 LTS and I installed the GNOME Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which means I can use the same kernel and commands in the computer.

Advantage compare with Ubuntu

After doing tests on the GNOME Ubuntu, I figure out some advantage of GNOME Ubuntu than Ubuntu Desktop. The starting up time of GNOME Ubuntu is much shorter than the Ubuntu Desktop. It took 2 to 3 minutes to start up the OPAC with the Ubuntu Desktop in the old days but now it just takes less than 2 minutes to bootstrap the OPAC.

Moreover, GUI supporting is much better. Since many GUI application is written with GTK+ and GNOME, GNOME Ubuntu has a better support than Unity and provides a better user experience.

Furthermore, GNOME Ubuntu provides a more natural UI for users than Ubuntu Desktop. The button are placed on the top right corner instead of top left corner which is more easy to use for Windows users. Also, the menu bar is place at the top of the application instead of the top of the whole window.

Disadvantage compared with Ubuntu

However, no pay no gain. There is cost in taking the advantage of GNOME Ubuntu.

The layout of GNOME Ubuntu is a bit boring for those using the colourful Unity. The colour using in GNOME Ubuntu make users feeling repeating and easily being upset in using. This would be a bad news as the computer is providing service for students search books.

What is more, GNOME Ubuntu does not have as much support as Ubuntu Desktop. For the field of desktop, Canonical Ltd. is still putting the focus on Ubuntu Desktop instead of GNOME Ubuntu. This is a unfavourable factor for putting GNOME Ubuntu in production.

Next, GNOME Ubuntu is much harder to download. As I am living in Hong Kong, I can easily get the Ubuntu install image from the mirror of CUHK. However, I need to get the GNOME Ubuntu installation image from cdimage.ubuntu.com which is far away from my home and takes me a long time to download.

Conclusion

Finally, installing GNOME Ubuntu on the school library computer as OPAC seems not a bad idea for now. I would observe whether the users prefer which Ubuntu.